Fair Trade in Action, Year 2: Delivering School Bags to Workers’ Children

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In March of 2013, we were very excited to support our producers with a project to distribute school supplies to the workers’ children right ahead of the school year in Pakistan. This project put one hundred backpacks filled with pencils, pens, notebooks, and other supplies directly in the hands of schoolchildren. The delivery of the backpacks and school supplies generated a lot of enthusiasm on the part of both the parents and kids, and it was immediately apparent that this was a project that needed to grow!

The school bags project is a very symbolic initiative. As a part of an industry with a controversial history of child labor, we want to do more than just refuse to use child workers. We want to improve the lives of our workers’ children. To achieve this, we provide our (adult!) producers with fair wages to make sure that their children don’t have to work and and we help equip young students for school.

The success of this initial program has encouraged us to go even further to improve the educational futures of these children in 2014. To achieve these aims, we partnered with Chicago Fair Trade, a nonprofit organization dedicated to furthering the Fair Trade movement and making sure that Chicago continues to be a leader in the international Fair Trade community. As soon as they heard about our campaign to provide our workers’ children with school supplies in 2013, they wanted to become involved to grow the impact. This year Fair Trade Chicago contributed to our School Bags campaign, and together we were able to grow from 100 bags delivered in 2013, to 200 bags in April of 2014!

We are thrilled to be able to help support education in such a tangible way, and also to find others who want to be a part of this initiative. Now, two hundred more kids will be able to have access to brand new school materials as they prepare for a new year of learning.

This is just a humble step towards improving the quality of life for our workers and their children, and we understand that there is still much more to be done. We will continue to work on growing our sales so that we can make a bigger impact. And we will work hard to actively listen to what workers have to say about these programs so that we can help improve not just their lives, but those of their children as well.

These types of programs are only possible because of our incredible customers, friends, and partners. Because of your desire to make a difference with the soccer equipment you choose, you are able to help improve workers’ lives. Thanks to you, 200 hundred children are now heading off to school better prepared to succeed!

A BIG thank you for your continued support of Senda and our Fair Trade mission. We are extremely pleased and so lucky to have you all as part of our team. I’m sure that our talented and hard-working Fair Trade producers are immensely grateful too!